Many common explosives, including materials used by modern terrorists, are very difficult to detect as they have very low vapor pressures at room temperature. When explosives are composited with organic materials to form plastic-bonded explosives (PBX), or are buried or concealed within parcels or clothing, the vapor pressures become vanishingly small. To achieve reliable detection through vapor-based methods, great volumes of air must be sampled. In addition, standard vapor pressure enhancing techniques such as heating may not be available as many explosives decompose at elevated temperatures. While a broad variety of approaches to detecting such explosives have been tried such as a trained dog, spectroscopy, separation followed by ion detection, immunochemical and electrochemical methods, and biosensors, no single technique concurrently satisfies the basic requirements of detection speed, selectivity, sensitivity, portability, affordability, and easy operability at a distance. What is needed therefore is an inexpensive explosives sensor that is sensitive to a broad range of explosives, can detect explosive materials rapidly, includes a sensing element that is capable of being interrogated wirelessly, and which can be embeddable in unobtrusive objects.